[Sticky] Q.bo One Review ( written from the point-of-view of an Indiegogo Backer )

My name is Niko, I've been passionate about robotics for over 5 years, and since 5 years ago I've been working in a company programming PLC's and robots.

On three occasions I've invested money to fund some of the robots that have been showing up in Indiegogo campaigns but all turned out to be a "scam".

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A year ago I learned that another robot was looking for funding and after my latest failures this time we decided to see if this "new" robot was getting backers at some point or it would be another scam of ​​the many that exist in Indiegogo and Kickstarter [ Pictures Removed by Moderator ] . In addition, it was perfect since I'm a fan of Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

I was quite surprised when a few months ago I began to see in the comments of the campaign that some backers had started to receive their robot, so I chose to buy mine in Indiegogo's INDEMAND, missing the special price it had had in the initial campaign. A pity! But that was nothing compared to what I received in return. A couple of weeks ago I finally received my Q.bo One and here is my experience:

The truth is that this didn't start well. The robot was stopped at customs for 2 days to check it and although I had been warned by the Thecorpora team that if I received mine with a customs stamp from my country I should not accept it, I decided that if the box arrived in good condition I would accept it anyways. Said and done, a DHL agent delivered the package and when opening it, apparently, everything was in perfect condition.

I knew from the thecorpora blog that my robot would arrive with version 2 of its operating system and that it was no longer necessary to open the robot to configure it and although I had already seen that some users reported some problems when configuring their robot for the first time I have to say that I had no problem in running DialogFlow and Google Assistance in just over 4 hours. P.S. I've never tried Scratch because I don't have children and I don't have much interest in that kind of visual programming.

"Ok, so now the good stuff: to see and interact with Google Assistance in a robot of this type is simply "impressive", my wife and I have a google home mini in the kitchen to which we have to continually say "ok google". With Q.bo it is not necessary, you can have a continuous interactive conversation while it follows you with its gaze and answers your questions in an "instant" way. I hope and wish that this is the future of social robotics."

Perhaps there are people who think that using a system like google assistance in an open source robot is not the most successful way but unfortunately and after several experiences using some open source assistants I think there are not many alternatives in the market. Since I'm following this project in social networks, I recently saw in a tweet that the CEO of the company was meeting with Mycroft the CEO's, an open source voice assistant based on Raspberyry Pi, although I have not tried it yet I've seen some tests on YouTube and it seems very promising. Can it be installed in Qbo?

I also think that it would be necessary for Q.bo to have some type of touch screen in the future, perhaps in the chest, since although you can program it by SSH, via web or by connecting a keyboard and a mouse, many useful applications in which I'm thinking about, currently would not make much sense.

I'm learning from the repositories that the project is hosted in Github to understand how Arduino controls all the Q.bo sensors and although I expected a much more complete SDK I think it is a good start to use a language like Python to understand the basis of this type of robot.

I've sent to the Thecorpora team an email to see what else we can expect in the near future and although they have not been very explicit, it seems that they are already working on a third version of their operating system.

As a constructive criticism to the Thecorpora team, I would recommend sending better manuals together with the robot, because even though all the installation steps are in their blog, I think something simpler, but at the same time clearer, is necessary.

As another Forum user said [sbondi]: "Thought I would post these notes, in case they are helpful to others  .  BTW, Thecorpora support was extremely helpful! "